Actually I'd put it this way: most people don't have special circumstances that are as easily recognizable in advance.
For example, Mum being chummy with the chairman of IBM at a time they're launching a product you're interested in is pretty trivially recognizable as a special circumstance.
Yes, I'm aware of this, but it's not clear to me whether the GPS coordinates are transmitted continually to the tower or only during a 9-1-1 call. It could be either, and to know for sure you'd have to look at the technical documentation. However even without GPS the companies have the capability of locating a handset by radiolocation techniques.
Kind of hard when the phone company needs to which cell tower you are communicating with. And depending on your network, they may have radiolocation capabilities in order to provide E911 without using the phone's GPS.
But what if the common man in the street could, in principle, buy information on someone else? Or could in principle assemble that information if he had sufficient time and resources?
You see, a government that is limited to what the common man in the street can do can be far more intrusive because they have more resources -- ditto for corporations. You have to limit government more than you limit the common man in the street. And you probably have to limit what very rich men in the street can do too.
Presumably the cops thought they didn't need a warrant.
A lot of the legal framework in the US around these matters dates back to the time of the Bill of Rights. In general courts have viewed police suspicion as something that doesn't violate your rights as a citizen. For example if a plainclothes cop decides you look suspicious and tails you for awhile, that's perfectly OK. He doesn't need a warrant.
The problem with technology is that we can now automate that process, and that often changes its character. A cop trailing you to see where you goes is a self-limiting process. It'd be too expensive and time consuming to do to everyone. But since everyone carries a phone now, the police actually can follow them everywhere, all the time, and it would cost them practically nothing. That's way more intrusive, even though on a case by case basis you're doing the exact same thing: keeping tabs on where someone goes.
And here's another wrinkle. Since you divulge your position to the phone company, under US common law it's not your private information. If the phone company decides to relay your position to the cops, it's completely kosher unless that disclosure is forbidden by statute or the court gets creative.
What technology allows the police to do obviously violates the spirit of the Constitution; so what the court has done is what courts sometimes done in similar cases (like contraception): try to infer underlying principles from the Bill of Rights and extrapolate them to the current situation under the 9th Amendment.
If you spend a lot of time entering text on your phone minor conveniences would add up over the course of a day.
It wouldn't make a difference for someone like me, since I at most spend a couple of minutes a day on my phone keyboard. On the other hand for most people the old buckling spring Model M keyboard I use when I'm coding is just a weird, ugly, noisy old dinosaur (kind of like me I guess). They wouldn't see the point, until they spend all day typing on the thing.
It's always good to be precise, accurate, and technically correct. But it's pointless to get bent out of shape by a technical error where the author's actual meaning is clear.
I am actually open to the suggestion that foreigners should be able to influence US elections; but only provided that it is done transparently. If Russia wants to make an argument that America should vote for candidate X, fine by me, as long as the message prominently informs readers of its source, e.g. "This message was funded in part by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation."
In fact I think this is a good idea all around. In an era where so much information is being delivered by the web, it is entirely feasible to put up links to all the corporate and organizational sources of messages and their officers. So if an anti-smoking regulation message is put up by a group named "Americans for Healthy Choices", we should be able to see a list of directors of that group and their resumes (which might tell us they work as attorneys for a tobacco company).
Ha. Unfortunately I suspect part of Clinton's failure (and there are multiple, non-mutually exclusive reasons) is that she's a bit on the humorless side.
I don't consider that a character fault, but it is a handicap.
is an indicator of a state or situation. For example c-reactive protein (one of the substances mentioned in the paper) is a marker of inflammation. It's actual function is to signal the immune system to clear out dead cells (both our own and bacterial).
Ischemic heart disease is an inflammatory disease; therefore if you are developing ischemic heart disease, you will find high levels of inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein.
However it seems to me it's a bit of a logical leap to do something which transiently increases inflammatory markers and then assume that means the subject's chances of getting a specific inflammatory disease are increased. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the paper.
And in a way that makes it the last bit of user responsiveness left in a world where software acts as if it knows better. A world where you aren't considered responsible enough to have a power switch, so that in certain circumstances the only way to shut a computer off is to take it apart with a screwdriver.
CTL-ALT-DELETE may be overloaded with multiple functions, but at least the system does it's best to prioritize responding to you.
You know, I have no interest in reading Clinton's book, but I did run into someone who did. He said (and this probably shouldn't come as a shock) that the media reports that make it sound like a vendetta book are misleading. Mostly it's campaign trail anecdotes.
Actually why don't you ask an actual botanist? Because I can tell you haven't.
Anyone with basic scientific literacy understand that plants live in ecosystems where they compete with other plants; furthermore any gardener will tell you that many plants are much more nitrogen and/or phosphorous limited than carbon limited. This means that the diversity of plant species will drop under higher CO2 scenarios as CO2 sensitive species outcompete less CO2 sensitive ones. High CO2 will be especially beneficial to plants like poison ivy that grow quickly and need lots of carbon for their cellulose structure.
Plant extinctions are easily deducible from a basic knowledge of ecology and gardening. Experimental work on CO2 impact is not promising either, indicating that many food species will produce more cellulose and other carbohydrate and less protein per pound. Plants experimentally grown in high CO2 environments develop abnormalities in their insect defenses that open them up to predation.
Understand by an "mass extinction event", we don't mean the extinction of all life. We mean a catastrophic loss of biodiversity. In a few million years, the Earth will be right as rain.
I bet in Japan there's a subculture of people who are amused by extremely tiny explosions. Explosions you can set off on your desktop, or maybe even in your pocket.
Because Apple is becoming a slightly more attractively designed version of Microsoft, from an HCI perspective.
This is a classic dickish Microsoft UI move: take something that you've decided is too complicated for users, and slap a simple-to-operate facade over it. But simple-to-operate does not necessarily mean simple-to-get-the-result-you-want. So if the UI doesn't do what you need it to, you google the registry settings so you can directly manipulate the persistent data structures that govern the behavior.
Well, I suppose this is an occasion for Bayesian reasoning. The probability that you buy bomb ingredients given that you're a terrorist being high doesn't mean that the probability that you are terrorist given that you buy bomb ingredients is necessarily high. In fact even if someone is *definitely* building a bomb, it doesn't automatically mean they are a terrorist.
On YouTube there's a whole genre of videos devoted to large Tannerite explosions. Tannerite is an impact-initiated binary explosive that is popular for making shooting targets. Normally it's used in small quantities but of course there are many videos of people setting off very large Tannerite explosions, involving hundreds of pounds of the stuff.
Some people are just fascinated with explosives. So what you have to ask is whether it is more common to be into blowing things up for DIY amusement or blowing things up to hurt people. Where people go wrong with this kind of question is they rely on their intuition in guessing prior probabilities. If blowing things up holds no fascination for them, they assume that that kind of thing must be rare, or even non-existent.
If that's the case, then it's not a problem. You're just showing ads for plastic buckets to people who don't want to build a bomb. I suspect the worry is that the algorithm might actually be working. In which case it's still not a problem. Once you have the recipe for a plastic bucket bomb, finding the bucket isn't a major obstacle.
If only there were some kind of Internet mechanism that would somehow link to other information resources that could answer questions like this. I have great acronym for it too: Really Terrific For Answers.
True, but you need to check the definition of "parody". It's not just *any* humorous or satirical use of the material. By its very nature, it requires the use of the specific source material in a way that no other material will do.
In other words there is no way to write a parody of Lord of the Rings without using Lord of the Rings. If what you're doing could be done with *other* materials, it's not parody.
I have to agree, but the point stands. Whether or not Assange is a pompous conceited ass has no bearing on his opinions or actions.
What we're looking like is a reflection of a fundamental problem with democracy. Democracy depends on an electorate that is educated on and involved in the issues. The problem is that issues are hard. They're full of gray areas and squirrelly corner cases.
But you know what's very easy? Deciding whether you like someone or not. Then if you conflate that with them being a good or bad person, and further decide that you'll trust all the "good" people completely and distrust all "bad" ones completely... Well then you'll never have to deal with difficult thinking ever again.
How do you know that you're one of those people? Well, if you can find a group of people somewhere whom you agree with pretty much all the time, that's a reliable sign that you don't really think for yourself. On the other hand, let's say you don't really fit in anywhere; you have some strong disagreements with the people you agree with most, and sometimes think people you dislike probably have a point... Congratulations then, that means you think for yourself. The fundamental philosophy of our government, of our very society was built around people like you. Kind of sad, when you think about it.
I think the point is that their voice doesn't count.
If EFF cannot get its concerns reflected in the outcome of the debate, it in effect has no role in the debate other than to lend spurious credibility to the result.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I'd put it this way: most people don't have special circumstances that are as easily recognizable in advance.
For example, Mum being chummy with the chairman of IBM at a time they're launching a product you're interested in is pretty trivially recognizable as a special circumstance.
Yes, I'm aware of this, but it's not clear to me whether the GPS coordinates are transmitted continually to the tower or only during a 9-1-1 call. It could be either, and to know for sure you'd have to look at the technical documentation. However even without GPS the companies have the capability of locating a handset by radiolocation techniques.
Kind of hard when the phone company needs to which cell tower you are communicating with. And depending on your network, they may have radiolocation capabilities in order to provide E911 without using the phone's GPS.
OK, that's a good starting point.
But what if the common man in the street could, in principle, buy information on someone else? Or could in principle assemble that information if he had sufficient time and resources?
You see, a government that is limited to what the common man in the street can do can be far more intrusive because they have more resources -- ditto for corporations. You have to limit government more than you limit the common man in the street. And you probably have to limit what very rich men in the street can do too.
Presumably the cops thought they didn't need a warrant.
A lot of the legal framework in the US around these matters dates back to the time of the Bill of Rights. In general courts have viewed police suspicion as something that doesn't violate your rights as a citizen. For example if a plainclothes cop decides you look suspicious and tails you for awhile, that's perfectly OK. He doesn't need a warrant.
The problem with technology is that we can now automate that process, and that often changes its character. A cop trailing you to see where you goes is a self-limiting process. It'd be too expensive and time consuming to do to everyone. But since everyone carries a phone now, the police actually can follow them everywhere, all the time, and it would cost them practically nothing. That's way more intrusive, even though on a case by case basis you're doing the exact same thing: keeping tabs on where someone goes.
And here's another wrinkle. Since you divulge your position to the phone company, under US common law it's not your private information. If the phone company decides to relay your position to the cops, it's completely kosher unless that disclosure is forbidden by statute or the court gets creative.
What technology allows the police to do obviously violates the spirit of the Constitution; so what the court has done is what courts sometimes done in similar cases (like contraception): try to infer underlying principles from the Bill of Rights and extrapolate them to the current situation under the 9th Amendment.
If you spend a lot of time entering text on your phone minor conveniences would add up over the course of a day.
It wouldn't make a difference for someone like me, since I at most spend a couple of minutes a day on my phone keyboard. On the other hand for most people the old buckling spring Model M keyboard I use when I'm coding is just a weird, ugly, noisy old dinosaur (kind of like me I guess). They wouldn't see the point, until they spend all day typing on the thing.
It's always good to be precise, accurate, and technically correct. But it's pointless to get bent out of shape by a technical error where the author's actual meaning is clear.
I am actually open to the suggestion that foreigners should be able to influence US elections; but only provided that it is done transparently. If Russia wants to make an argument that America should vote for candidate X, fine by me, as long as the message prominently informs readers of its source, e.g. "This message was funded in part by the Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation."
In fact I think this is a good idea all around. In an era where so much information is being delivered by the web, it is entirely feasible to put up links to all the corporate and organizational sources of messages and their officers. So if an anti-smoking regulation message is put up by a group named "Americans for Healthy Choices", we should be able to see a list of directors of that group and their resumes (which might tell us they work as attorneys for a tobacco company).
When did we start measuring air pressure in feet?
About the time that altitude-based pressure differences became a health concern.
Yes, this is news for nerds; I think you're looking for news for pedants.
Ha. Unfortunately I suspect part of Clinton's failure (and there are multiple, non-mutually exclusive reasons) is that she's a bit on the humorless side.
I don't consider that a character fault, but it is a handicap.
is an indicator of a state or situation. For example c-reactive protein (one of the substances mentioned in the paper) is a marker of inflammation. It's actual function is to signal the immune system to clear out dead cells (both our own and bacterial).
Ischemic heart disease is an inflammatory disease; therefore if you are developing ischemic heart disease, you will find high levels of inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein.
However it seems to me it's a bit of a logical leap to do something which transiently increases inflammatory markers and then assume that means the subject's chances of getting a specific inflammatory disease are increased. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the paper.
And in a way that makes it the last bit of user responsiveness left in a world where software acts as if it knows better. A world where you aren't considered responsible enough to have a power switch, so that in certain circumstances the only way to shut a computer off is to take it apart with a screwdriver.
CTL-ALT-DELETE may be overloaded with multiple functions, but at least the system does it's best to prioritize responding to you.
You know, I have no interest in reading Clinton's book, but I did run into someone who did. He said (and this probably shouldn't come as a shock) that the media reports that make it sound like a vendetta book are misleading. Mostly it's campaign trail anecdotes.
Actually why don't you ask an actual botanist? Because I can tell you haven't.
Anyone with basic scientific literacy understand that plants live in ecosystems where they compete with other plants; furthermore any gardener will tell you that many plants are much more nitrogen and/or phosphorous limited than carbon limited. This means that the diversity of plant species will drop under higher CO2 scenarios as CO2 sensitive species outcompete less CO2 sensitive ones. High CO2 will be especially beneficial to plants like poison ivy that grow quickly and need lots of carbon for their cellulose structure.
Plant extinctions are easily deducible from a basic knowledge of ecology and gardening. Experimental work on CO2 impact is not promising either, indicating that many food species will produce more cellulose and other carbohydrate and less protein per pound. Plants experimentally grown in high CO2 environments develop abnormalities in their insect defenses that open them up to predation.
Understand by an "mass extinction event", we don't mean the extinction of all life. We mean a catastrophic loss of biodiversity. In a few million years, the Earth will be right as rain.
I bet in Japan there's a subculture of people who are amused by extremely tiny explosions. Explosions you can set off on your desktop, or maybe even in your pocket.
Because Apple is becoming a slightly more attractively designed version of Microsoft, from an HCI perspective.
This is a classic dickish Microsoft UI move: take something that you've decided is too complicated for users, and slap a simple-to-operate facade over it. But simple-to-operate does not necessarily mean simple-to-get-the-result-you-want. So if the UI doesn't do what you need it to, you google the registry settings so you can directly manipulate the persistent data structures that govern the behavior.
Well, I suppose this is an occasion for Bayesian reasoning. The probability that you buy bomb ingredients given that you're a terrorist being high doesn't mean that the probability that you are terrorist given that you buy bomb ingredients is necessarily high. In fact even if someone is *definitely* building a bomb, it doesn't automatically mean they are a terrorist.
On YouTube there's a whole genre of videos devoted to large Tannerite explosions. Tannerite is an impact-initiated binary explosive that is popular for making shooting targets. Normally it's used in small quantities but of course there are many videos of people setting off very large Tannerite explosions, involving hundreds of pounds of the stuff.
Some people are just fascinated with explosives. So what you have to ask is whether it is more common to be into blowing things up for DIY amusement or blowing things up to hurt people. Where people go wrong with this kind of question is they rely on their intuition in guessing prior probabilities. If blowing things up holds no fascination for them, they assume that that kind of thing must be rare, or even non-existent.
If that's the case, then it's not a problem. You're just showing ads for plastic buckets to people who don't want to build a bomb. I suspect the worry is that the algorithm might actually be working. In which case it's still not a problem. Once you have the recipe for a plastic bucket bomb, finding the bucket isn't a major obstacle.
If only there were some kind of Internet mechanism that would somehow link to other information resources that could answer questions like this. I have great acronym for it too: Really Terrific For Answers.
True, but you need to check the definition of "parody". It's not just *any* humorous or satirical use of the material. By its very nature, it requires the use of the specific source material in a way that no other material will do.
In other words there is no way to write a parody of Lord of the Rings without using Lord of the Rings. If what you're doing could be done with *other* materials, it's not parody.
Irony is not your strong suit, I see.
I just pointed out that the poster didn't actually refute anything.
Appeal to the stone.
Well, if even if you won that wager it wouldn't make any difference. Copyright includes the right to control the creation of derivative work.
I have to agree, but the point stands. Whether or not Assange is a pompous conceited ass has no bearing on his opinions or actions.
What we're looking like is a reflection of a fundamental problem with democracy. Democracy depends on an electorate that is educated on and involved in the issues. The problem is that issues are hard. They're full of gray areas and squirrelly corner cases.
But you know what's very easy? Deciding whether you like someone or not. Then if you conflate that with them being a good or bad person, and further decide that you'll trust all the "good" people completely and distrust all "bad" ones completely... Well then you'll never have to deal with difficult thinking ever again.
How do you know that you're one of those people? Well, if you can find a group of people somewhere whom you agree with pretty much all the time, that's a reliable sign that you don't really think for yourself. On the other hand, let's say you don't really fit in anywhere; you have some strong disagreements with the people you agree with most, and sometimes think people you dislike probably have a point... Congratulations then, that means you think for yourself. The fundamental philosophy of our government, of our very society was built around people like you. Kind of sad, when you think about it.
I think the point is that their voice doesn't count.
If EFF cannot get its concerns reflected in the outcome of the debate, it in effect has no role in the debate other than to lend spurious credibility to the result.